OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Survey on Deep Learning-Based Monocular Spacecraft Pose Estimation: Current State, Limitations and Prospects
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Estimating the pose of an uncooperative spacecraft is an important computer vision problem for enabling the deployment of automatic vision-based systems in orbit, with applications ranging from on-orbit servicing to space debris removal. Following the general trend in computer vision, more and more works have been focusing on leveraging Deep Learning (DL) methods to address this problem. However and despite promising research-stage results, major challenges preventing the use of such methods in real-life missions still stand in the way. In particular, the deployment of such computation-intensive algorithms is still under-investigated, while the performance drop when training on synthetic and testing on real images remains to mitigate. The primary goal of this survey is to describe the current DL-based methods for spacecraft pose estimation in a comprehensive manner. The secondary goal is to help define the limitations towards the effective deployment of DL-based spacecraft pose estimation solutions for reliable autonomous vision-based applications. To this end, the survey first summarises the existing algorithms according to two approaches: hybrid modular pipelines and direct end-to-end regression methods. A comparison of algorithms is presented not only in terms of pose accuracy but also with a focus on network architectures and models' sizes keeping potential deployment in mind. Then, current monocular spacecraft pose estimation datasets used to train and test these methods are discussed. The data generation methods: simulators and testbeds, the domain gap and the performance drop between synthetically generated and lab/space collected images and the potential solutions are also discussed. Finally, the paper presents open research questions and future directions in the field, drawing parallels with other computer vision applications.
Towards Detecting Inauthentic Coordination in Twitter Likes Data
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Social media feeds typically favor posts according to user engagement. The most ubiquitous type of engagement (and the type we study) is *likes*. Users customarily take engagement metrics such as likes as a neutral proxy for quality and authority. This incentivizes like manipulation to influence public opinion through *coordinated inauthentic behavior* (CIB). CIB targeted at likes is largely unstudied as collecting suitable data about users' liking behavior is non-trivial. This paper contributes a scripted algorithm to collect suitable liking data from Twitter and a collected 30 day dataset of liking data from the Danish political Twittersphere #dkpol, over which we analyze the script's performance. Using only the binary matrix of users and the tweets they liked, we identify large clusters of perfectly correlated users, and discuss our findings in relation to CIB.
Design and Development of a Java Parallel I/O Library
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Parallel I/O refers to the ability of scientific programs to concurrently read/write from/to a single file from multiple processes executing on distributed memory platforms like compute clusters. In the HPC world, I/O becomes a significant bottleneck for many real-world scientific applications. In the last two decades, there has been significant research in improving the performance of I/O operations in scientific computing for traditional languages including C, C++, and Fortran. As a result of this, several mature and high-performance libraries including ROMIO (implementation of MPI-IO), parallel HDF5, Parallel I/O (PIO), and parallel netCDF are available today that provide efficient I/O for scientific applications. However, there is very little research done to evaluate and improve I/O performance of Java-based HPC applications. The main hindrance in the development of efficient parallel I/O Java libraries is the lack of a standard API (something equivalent to MPI-IO). Some adhoc solutions have been developed and used in proprietary applications, but there is no general-purpose solution that can be used by performance hungry applications. As part of this project, we plan to develop a Java-based parallel I/O API inspired by the MPI-IO bindings (MPI 2.0 standard document) for C, C++, and Fortran. Once the Java equivalent API of MPI-IO has been developed, we will develop a reference implementation on top of existing Java messaging libraries. Later, we will evaluate and compare performance of our reference Java Parallel I/O library with C/C++ counterparts using benchmarks and real-world applications.
Comparison of machine learning models applied on anonymized data with different techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Anonymization techniques based on obfuscating the quasi-identifiers by means of value generalization hierarchies are widely used to achieve preset levels of privacy. To prevent different types of attacks against database privacy it is necessary to apply several anonymization techniques beyond the classical k-anonymity or $\ell$-diversity. However, the application of these methods is directly connected to a reduction of their utility in prediction and decision making tasks. In this work we study four classical machine learning methods currently used for classification purposes in order to analyze the results as a function of the anonymization techniques applied and the parameters selected for each of them. The performance of these models is studied when varying the value of k for k-anonymity and additional tools such as $\ell$-diversity, t-closeness and $δ$-disclosure privacy are also deployed on the well-known adult dataset.
Accelerating Statewide Connected Vehicles Big (Sensor Fusion) Data ETL Pipelines on GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Real-time traffic and sensor data from connected vehicles have the potential to provide insights that will lead to the immediate benefit of efficient management of the transportation infrastructure and related adjacent services. However, the growth of electric vehicles (EVs) and connected vehicles (CVs) has generated an abundance of CV data and sensor data that has put a strain on the processing capabilities of existing data center infrastructure. As a result, the benefits are either delayed or not fully realized. To address this issue, we propose a solution for processing state-wide CV traffic and sensor data on GPUs that provides real-time micro-scale insights in both temporal and spatial dimensions. This is achieved through the use of the Nvidia Rapids framework and the Dask parallel cluster in Python. Our findings demonstrate a 70x acceleration in the extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) of CV data for the State of Missouri for a full day of all unique CV journeys, reducing the processing time from approximately 48 hours to just 25 minutes. Given that these results are for thousands of CVs and several thousands of individual journeys with sub-second sensor data, implies that we can model and obtain actionable insights for the management of the transportation infrastructure.
Improving Cascaded Unsupervised Speech Translation with Denoising Back-translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Most of the speech translation models heavily rely on parallel data, which is hard to collect especially for low-resource languages. To tackle this issue, we propose to build a cascaded speech translation system without leveraging any kind of paired data. We use fully unpaired data to train our unsupervised systems and evaluate our results on CoVoST 2 and CVSS. The results show that our work is comparable with some other early supervised methods in some language pairs. While cascaded systems always suffer from severe error propagation problems, we proposed denoising back-translation (DBT), a novel approach to building robust unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT). DBT successfully increases the BLEU score by 0.7--0.9 in all three translation directions. Moreover, we simplified the pipeline of our cascaded system to reduce inference latency and conducted a comprehensive analysis of every part of our work. We also demonstrate our unsupervised speech translation results on the established website.
Reversible Bond Logic
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2023
Year: 2023

The field of molecular programming allows for the programming of the structure and behavior of matter at the molecular level, even to the point of encoding arbitrary computation. However, current approaches tend to be wasteful in terms of monomers, gate complexes, and free energy. In response, we present a novel abstract model of molecular programming, Reversible Bond Logic (RBL), which exploits the concepts of reversibility and reversible computing to help address these issues. RBL systems permit very general manipulations of arbitrarily complex 'molecular' structures, and possess properties such as component reuse, modularity, compositionality. We will demonstrate the implementation of a common free-energy currency that can be shared across systems, initially using it to power a biased walker. Then we will introduce some basic motifs for the manipulation of structures, which will be used to implement such computational primitives as conditional branching, looping, and subroutines. Example programs will include logical negation, and addition and squaring of arbitrarily large numbers. As a consequence of reversibility, we will also obtain the inverse programs (subtraction and square-rooting) for free. Due to modularity, multiple instances of these computations can occur in parallel without cross-talk. Future work aims to further characterize RBL, and develop variants that may be amenable to experimental implementation.
Beyond Prompts: Exploring the Design Space of Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Generative Artificial Intelligence systems have been developed for image, code, story, and game generation with the goal of facilitating human creativity. Recent work on neural generative systems has emphasized one particular means of interacting with AI systems: the user provides a specification, usually in the form of prompts, and the AI system generates the content. However, there are other configurations of human and AI coordination, such as co-creativity (CC) in which both human and AI systems can contribute to content creation, and mixed-initiative (MI) in which both human and AI systems can initiate content changes. In this paper, we define a hypothetical human-AI configuration design space consisting of different means for humans and AI systems to communicate creative intent to each other. We conduct a human participant study with 185 participants to understand how users want to interact with differently configured MI-CC systems. We find out that MI-CC systems with more extensive coverage of the design space are rated higher or on par on a variety of creative and goal-completion metrics, demonstrating that wider coverage of the design space can improve user experience and achievement when using the system; Preference varies greatly between expertise groups, suggesting the development of adaptive, personalized MI-CC systems; Participants identified new design space dimensions including scrutability -- the ability to poke and prod at models -- and explainability.
Comprehensive Solution Program Centric Pretraining for Table-and-Text Hybrid Numerical Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Numerical reasoning over table-and-text hybrid passages, such as financial reports, poses significant challenges and has numerous potential applications. Noise and irrelevant variables in the model input have been a hindrance to its performance. Additionally, coarse-grained supervision of the whole solution program has impeded the model's ability to learn the underlying numerical reasoning process. In this paper, we propose three pretraining tasks that operate at both the whole program and sub-program level: Variable Integrity Ranking, which guides the model to focus on useful variables; Variable Operator Prediction, which decomposes the supervision into fine-grained single operator prediction; and Variable Keyphrase Masking, which encourages the model to identify key evidence that sub-programs are derived from. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, surpassing transformer-based model baselines.
Reduced Label Complexity For Tight $\ell_2$ Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Given data ${\rm X}\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$ and labels $\mathbf{y}\in\mathbb{R}^{n}$ the goal is find $\mathbf{w}\in\mathbb{R}^d$ to minimize $\Vert{\rm X}\mathbf{w}-\mathbf{y}\Vert^2$. We give a polynomial algorithm that, \emph{oblivious to $\mathbf{y}$}, throws out $n/(d+\sqrt{n})$ data points and is a $(1+d/n)$-approximation to optimal in expectation. The motivation is tight approximation with reduced label complexity (number of labels revealed). We reduce label complexity by $Ω(\sqrt{n})$. Open question: Can label complexity be reduced by $Ω(n)$ with tight $(1+d/n)$-approximation?
Learning representations that are closed-form Monge mapping optimal with application to domain adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Optimal transport (OT) is a powerful geometric tool used to compare and align probability measures following the least effort principle. Despite its widespread use in machine learning (ML), OT problem still bears its computational burden, while at the same time suffering from the curse of dimensionality for measures supported on general high-dimensional spaces. In this paper, we propose to tackle these challenges using representation learning. In particular, we seek to learn an embedding space such that the samples of the two input measures become alignable in it with a simple affine mapping that can be calculated efficiently in closed-form. We then show that such approach leads to results that are comparable to solving the original OT problem when applied to the transfer learning task on which many OT baselines where previously evaluated in both homogeneous and heterogeneous DA settings. The code for our contribution is available at \url{https://github.com/Oleffa/LaOT}.
Periscope: A Robotic Camera System to Support Remote Physical Collaboration
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

We investigate how robotic camera systems can offer new capabilities to computer-supported cooperative work through the design, development, and evaluation of a prototype system called Periscope. With Periscope, a local worker completes manipulation tasks with guidance from a remote helper who observes the workspace through a camera mounted on a semi-autonomous robotic arm that is co-located with the worker. Our key insight is that the helper, the worker, and the robot should all share responsibility of the camera view--an approach we call shared camera control. Using this approach, we present a set of modes that distribute the control of the camera between the human collaborators and the autonomous robot depending on task needs. We demonstrate the system's utility and the promise of shared camera control through a preliminary study where 12 dyads collaboratively worked on assembly tasks. Finally, we discuss design and research implications of our work for future robotic camera systems that facilitate remote collaboration.
Retrospective End-User Walkthrough: A Method for Assessing How People Combine Multiple AI Models in Decision-Making Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Evaluating human-AI decision-making systems is an emerging challenge as new ways of combining multiple AI models towards a specific goal are proposed every day. As humans interact with AI in decision-making systems, multiple factors may be present in a task including trust, interpretability, and explainability, amongst others. In this context, this work proposes a retrospective method to support a more holistic understanding of how people interact with and connect multiple AI models and combine multiple outputs in human-AI decision-making systems. The method consists of employing a retrospective end-user walkthrough with the objective of providing support to HCI practitioners so that they may gain an understanding of the higher order cognitive processes in place and the role that AI model outputs play in human-AI decision-making. The method was qualitatively assessed with 29 participants (four participants in a pilot phase; 25 participants in the main user study) interacting with a human-AI decision-making system in the context of financial decision-making. The system combines visual analytics, three AI models for revenue prediction, AI-supported analogues analysis, and hypothesis testing using external news and natural language processing to provide multiple means for comparing companies. Beyond results on tasks and usability problems, outcomes presented suggest that the method is promising in highlighting why AI models are ignored, used, or trusted, and how future interactions are planned. We suggest that HCI practitioners researching human-AI interaction can benefit by adding this step to user studies in a debriefing stage as a retrospective Thinking-Aloud protocol would be applied, but with emphasis on revisiting tasks and understanding why participants ignored or connected predictions while performing a task.
Variational Approach to Viscoelastic Fracture : Comparison of a phase-field and of a lip-field approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

Fracture of viscoelastic materials is considered to be a complex phenomenon due to their highly rate sensitive behavior. In this context, we are interested in the quasi-static response of a viscoelastic solid subjected to damage. This paper outlines a new incremental variational based approach and its computational implementation to model damage in viscoelastic solids. The variational formalism allows us to embed the local constitutive equations into a global incremental potential, the minimization of which provides the solution to the mechanical problem. Softening damage models in their local form are known to result in spurious mesh-sensitive results, and hence non-locality (or regularization) has to be introduced to preserve the mathematical relevance of the problem. In the present paper, we consider two different regularization techniques for the viscoelastic damage model : a particular phase-field and a lip-field approach. The model parameters are calibrated to obtain some equivalence between both these approaches. Numerical results are then presented for the bidimensional case and both these approaches compare well. Numerical results also demonstrate the ability of the model to qualitatively represent the typical rate-dependent behaviour of the viscoelastic materials. Besides, the novelty of the present work lies in the use of lip-field approach for the first time in a viscoelastic context.
Content-based jewellery item retrieval using the local region-based histograms
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Jewellery item retrieval is regularly used to find what people want on online marketplaces using a sample query reference image. Considering recent developments, due to the simultaneous nature of various jewelry items, various jewelry goods' occlusion in images or visual streams, as well as shape deformation, content-based jewellery item retrieval (CBJIR) still has limitations whenever it pertains to visual searching in the actual world. This article proposed a content-based jewellery item retrieval method using the local region-based histograms in HSV color space. Using five local regions, our novel jewellery classification module extracts the specific feature vectors from the query image. The jewellery classification module is also applied to the jewellery database to extract feature vectors. Finally, the similarity score is matched between the database and query features vectors to retrieve the jewellery items from the database. The proposed method performance is tested on publicly available jewellery item retrieval datasets, i.e. ringFIR and Fashion Product Images dataset. The experimental results demonstrate the dominance of the proposed method over the baseline methods for retrieving desired jewellery products.
KmerCo: A lightweight K-mer counting technique with a tiny memory footprint
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

K-mer counting is a requisite process for DNA assembly because it speeds up its overall process. The frequency of K-mers is used for estimating the parameters of DNA assembly, error correction, etc. The process also provides a list of district K-mers which assist in searching large databases and reducing the size of de Bruijn graphs. Nonetheless, K-mer counting is a data and compute-intensive process. Hence, it is crucial to implement a lightweight data structure that occupies low memory but does fast processing of K-mers. We proposed a lightweight K-mer counting technique, called KmerCo that implements a potent counting Bloom Filter variant, called countBF. KmerCo has two phases: insertion and classification. The insertion phase inserts all K-mers into countBF and determines distinct K-mers. The classification phase is responsible for the classification of distinct K-mers into trustworthy and erroneous K-mers based on a user-provided threshold value. We also proposed a novel benchmark performance metric. We used the Hadoop MapReduce program to determine the frequency of K-mers. We have conducted rigorous experiments to prove the dominion of KmerCo compared to state-of-the-art K-mer counting techniques. The experiments are conducted using DNA sequences of four organisms. The datasets are pruned to generate four different size datasets. KmerCo is compared with Squeakr, BFCounter, and Jellyfish. KmerCo took the lowest memory, highest number of insertions per second, and a positive trustworthy rate as compared with the three above-mentioned methods.
Dish detection in food platters: A framework for automated diet logging and nutrition management
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Diet is central to the epidemic of lifestyle disorders. Accurate and effortless diet logging is one of the significant bottlenecks for effective diet management and calorie restriction. Dish detection from food platters is a challenging problem due to a visually complex food layout. We present an end-to-end computational framework for diet management, from data compilation, annotation, and state-of-the-art model identification to its mobile app implementation. As a case study, we implement the framework in the context of Indian food platters known for their complex presentation that poses a challenge for the automated detection of dishes. Starting with the 61 most popular Indian dishes, we identify the state-of-the-art model through a comparative analysis of deep-learning-based object detection architectures. Rooted in a meticulous compilation of 68,005 platter images with 134,814 manual dish annotations, we first compare ten architectures for multi-label classification to identify ResNet152 (mAP=84.51%) as the best model. YOLOv8x (mAP=87.70%) emerged as the best model architecture for dish detection among the eight deep-learning models implemented after a thorough performance evaluation. By comparing with the state-of-the-art model for the IndianFood10 dataset, we demonstrate the superior object detection performance of YOLOv8x for this subset and establish Resnet152 as the best architecture for multi-label classification. The models thus trained on richly annotated data can be extended to include dishes from across global cuisines. The proposed framework is demonstrated through a proof-of-concept mobile application with diverse applications for diet logging, food recommendation systems, nutritional interventions, and mitigation of lifestyle disorders.